Wednesday, December 23, 2015

THE DEFAULT IN OUR STARS

Opening today:

The Big Short—The prestige Christmas Day releases this year
have such feel-good subjects as concussions in the NFL and two women persecuted
for a lesbian affair in the ‘50s. Beating these two into the multiplexes today
is this jolly romp about the criminal idiocies leading up to the collapse of
the housing market in 2008.

But I’m not being facetious. It really is a jolly romp.
Director and co-writer Adam McKay, best known for Will Farrell flicks like Anchorman,
uses his anything-goes comedy techniques to give this infuriating and
depressing material a sort of Brechtian vaudeville energy, and the result is
one of the most absorbing and perversely entertaining movies of the year.

Based, like 2011’s excellent Moneyball, on a nonfiction book
by Michael Lewis, the film follows several traders and investors who predicted,
or were made to believe, that the market, balanced on atrociously unstable
subprime mortgage bonds, would collapse starting in 2007. Because of the
received wisdom that the housing market was unshakable, these guys were seen
as crackpots when they began to “short” (bet against) the housing market with
“Credit Default Swaps” in the mid-2000s. When the market did indeed melt down
in 2007-2008, they looked like geniuses. Jackals too, perhaps—and the movie
doesn’t try to deny it—but genius jackals.

Said geniuses (some of them are dramatized under their own
names, others under pseudonyms) include Christian Bale as a socially awkward
California doctor turned hedge fund manager who horrified his own investors by
pouring millions into swaps, and Finn Whitrock and John Magaro as two
small-potatoes hedge fund guys who got into swaps with the help of their
disillusioned mentor Brad Pitt (who also executive-produced). Steve Carrell
plays an abrasive hedge fund boss, haunted by a personal tragedy, who worked
under the aegis of Morgan Stanley with his small team of wound-up, bantering,
obscenity-spouting traders (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall and Hamish Linklater).

They’re all excellent, but the liveliest of the
leads is Ryan Gosling as the swaggering Deutsche Bank trader who sells Carrell
on shorting the market. Gosling’s character frequently looks into the camera
and addresses us—several characters do, but this guy most of all—and having
the least tortured, most unapologetically mercenary ofThe Big Short’s players serve as its spokesman goes a long way to rescuing it from piety.

You’ll notice that in the preceding paragraphs I throw
around financial terms like I remotely understand them. I assure you I probably
understand them far less than you do, although after seeing this movie—assuming
that it’s reasonably accurate—I now understand them far better than I did before. McKay
makes the movie a remedial-level course in finance, and he uses gimmicky shtick
to keep us interested—he shows us Margot Robbie luxuriating in a bubble bath
with a glass of champagne while she explains subprime mortgages to us, and a
couple of other celebrities pop up to give us brief tutorials.

The implication of these gags could be seen, in a sense, as
an insult to the audience. But it’s an elegant and entertaining insult. And,
alas, not an unfair one

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My work has appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies (where I was a staff writer for several years) to USA Today, from Phoenix Magazine and Wrangler News and the East Valley Tribune to the Erie Times-News, Seattle Times and Detroit Metro Times to Rewind Magazine.

I'm that rare example of a living poet who has had a sonnet published in Weird Tales, and my poems have also appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly.

I've acted in theatre productions in six states and the District of Columbia, and appear for about six seconds as an extra (a prison guard) in the John Waters film Cry-Baby.

I directed Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at Southwest Shakespeare Festival, and a short film called Holding Back the Dawn, based on a short story by my friend Barry Graham.

I was host of Another Saturday Night, a pop culture and film review show on KTAR radio.

I have produced, directed and acted in radio plays for NPR, KTAR and the Sun Sounds Radio service.